In 1878, a Brooklynite named Mollie Fancher, bedridden and afflicted with mysterious symptoms after a serious accident with a street car, claimed to have eaten next to nothing for more than a decade following the accident. Fancher's apparent ability to survive without sustenance earned her such renown that an estimated 75,000–100,000 visitors trooped through her bedroom over the course of three decades. Yet Stacey (Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate and Fear Food) maintains that Fancher's significance lies "in what she ignited"—which was a great deal of intense debate between religious and scientific leaders. Calling Fancher "a lightning rod for some of the largest intellectual storms of her time," Stacey explains that the "fasting girl" embodied many of the strongest anxieties and most pervasive cultural fantasies of her day. Most notably, her survival without nourishment—which the author acknowledges was impossible—appeared to validate religious beliefs that there were mysteries beyond the ken of modern science. And at the dawn of the age of psychotherapy, Fancher's case was also indicative of the ostensibly new phenomenon whereby the stresses of everyday life in an urban, industrial society were severe enough to induce what today some would call profound neuroses. More a cultural history of late 19th-century America than a biography of Fancher, this is a fascinating account of the intellectual currents that shaped the way the nation understood itself and of the cultural pressures that often made it difficult for young women like Fancher to feel stable or secure about their identities or their place in the world. Touching on topics ranging from spiritualism to hysteria to anorexia, Stacey deftly captures both the excitement and the fear that surrounded such topics, drawing subtle parallels between Fancher's age and our own. (Mar.)
